Social Honeypots: Making Friends With a Spammer Near You

Social networking communities have become an important communications platform, but the popularity of these communities has also made them targets for a new breed of social spammers. Unfortunately, little is known about these social spammers, their level of sophistication, or their strategies and tactics. This paper provides the first characterization of social spammers and their behaviors. It also says that the behaviors of social spammers exhibit recognizable temporal and geographic patterns and that social spam content contains various distinguishing characteristics. These results are quite promising and suggest that analysis techniques may be used to automatically identify social spam.